Sarah Manguso, 50, is the author of nine books, including two collections of poetry, four works of nonfiction, a volume of short stories and two novels. Her darkly comic memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (2008) charted her experience of a rare autoimmune disease and the years of treatment that brutalised her mental and physical health through her 20s. Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015) is an account of her obsessive diary-keeping, and a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice. 300 Arguments (2017) – a collection of aphorisms on desire and failure – was named a best book of the year by more than 20 publications, and her first novel, Very Cold People (2022), was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein award. Manguso’s new novel, Liars, documents the end of a marriage. She was born and raised in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles.
Liars, your second novel, was not the book you expected to write…
As I conceived of it, my next book was going to be a period piece set in New England, in the 1940s, and it was going to confront the nuanced and tortured history of who in America got to be “white” and after how many generations. It was roughly inspired by some things I found out about my own family, like the interesting condition of not being born white according to the census, but becoming legally white later in life. That happened to my parents. I’m the first person in my family who was born white. My parents look white, but there are certain ethnicities that, upon arrival, were not considered white.
